Month: October 2017

As I’ve written many times (e.g., here), it is difficult to overestimate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial services industry. As Wired magazine said, “it is no surprise that AI tops the list of potentially disruptive technologies”. With Forrester further forecasting that a quarter of financial sector jobs will be “impacted” by AI before 2020, there’s an urgent need for the island begin to think about the next generation of financial services and begin to formulate a realistic strategy not only to copy with the changes but to exploit them. It is because the need is so urgent that I was delighted to be asked to give a keynote at the Cognitive Finance AI Retreat in September (Which began with a beach barbecue, something I recommend to conference producers everywhere.)

A beach barbecue is always a good idea at a conference.

The event was put together by my good friends at Cognitive Finance working with Digital Jersey (where I am advisor to the board) and they did a great job of bringing together a spectrum of both subject matter experts and informed commentators to cover a wide variety of issues and provide a great platform for learning.

On the first day of the event, political economist Will Hutton emphasised that financial services will be at the “cutting edge” of the big data revolution, pointing out that not only does the sector hold highly personal, highly valuable data about individuals, but that it has more complex oversight requirements than most other sectors.

Clara Durodie, CEO of Cognitive Finance Group kicked off the event by talking about the potential for AI to help to manage the colossal flows of data that characterise the financial sector today and I think she was right to highlight that the use of the technologies presents tremendous opportunities here.

In his superb “Radical Technologies, Adam Greenfield wrote of the advance of automation that many of us (me included, by the way) cling to the hope that “there are some creative tasks that computers will simply never be able to peform”. I have no evidence that financial services regulation will be one of those tasks, so in my talk I suggested AI will be the most important “regtech” of all and made a few suggestions as to how regulators can plan to use the technology to create a better (that is faster, cheaper and more transparent) financial services sector. The strategic core of my suggestion was that jurisdictional competition to create a more cost-effective financial services market might be a competition that Jersey could do well in.

Regulation, however, was only one the topics discussed in a fascinating couple of days of talks, discussions and case studies. The surprise for me was that there was a lot of discussion about ethics, and how to incorporate ethics into the decision-making processes of AI systems so that they can be accountable. I hadn’t spent too much time thinking about this before, but I was certainly left with the impression that this might be one of the more difficult problems to address and talking with very well-informed presenters. Listening to experts such as Dr. Michael Aikenhead, Kay Firth-Butterfield, Dr. Sabine Dembrowski, Andrew Davies and many other leading names in finance and AI left me energised with the possibilities and intrigued by the problems.

AI is an event horizon for the financial services industry. With our current knowledge, we simply cannot see (or perhaps even imagine) the other side of the introduction of true AI into our business. But we can see that our traditional “laws” of cost-benefit analysis, compliance and competition will not hold in that new financial services space, which is why it is important to start thinking about what the new “laws” might be and how the financial services can take advantage of them.

Writing in the Bank of England’s “Bank Underground” blog, Simon Scorer from the Digital Currencies Division makes a number of very interesting points about the requirement for some form of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). He remarks on the transition from dumb money to smart money, and the consequent potential for the implementation of digital fiat to become a platform for innovation (something I strongly agree with), saying that:

Other possible areas of innovation relate to the potential programmability of payments; for instance, it might be possible to automate some tax payments (e.g. when buying a coffee, the net amount could be paid directly to the coffee shop, with a 20% VAT payment routed directly to HMRC), or parents may be able to set limits on their children’s spending or restrict them to trusted stores or websites.

If digital fiat were to be managed via some form of shared ledger, then Simon’s insight here suggests that it is not the shared ledger but the shared ledger applications (what some people still, annoyingly, insist on calling “smart contracts”) that will become the nexus for radical innovation. They bring intelligence to money, and some people think this is more revolutionary than it first appears. One such person is Eric Lonergan. Eric is someone I always take seriously. He’s a hedge fund manager, economist and writer. He wrote a great book about money, called Money, and he is a source of clear thinking on many issues around this central topic of shared interest. Here’s what he had to say about Bitcoin recently.

The most significant innovation in Bitcoin is not blockchain, nor the fact that it is a non-state-backed electronic currency. It is truly ground-breaking because it is the first ‘intelligent’ money. An ‘intelligent money’ is one which self-regulates.

Quite, but this form of intelligence is only one kind and the Bitcoin self-regulation is only one kind of self-regulation. There are some truly surprising possibilities once you add general-purpose programmability. I have bored people to tears repeatedly with my standard four hour lecture about why the incorrectly labelled “smart contracts” will be the source of real innovation in the world of cryptocurrency and, indeed, why one of the first uses of those smart contracts (ICOs and tokens) will be much more important to the world of financial services than, say, Bitcoin. But that kind of self-regulation may not be the only thing that intelligent money does. Eric goes on to say that:

‘Intelligence’ could also embed social goals – for example the currency could self-regulate the activities for which it is used, perhaps even rewarding or punishing activities contingent on their social impact. In extremis, I imagine we will have a currency which is fully intelligent, gathers data and evolves its own rules of distribution and growth. .

As you will deduce from the subtitle of my recent book “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin – From money that we understand to money that understand us” I agree. What’s more, as Eric says, “my sense is that it [intelligent money] is inevitable – indeed it could be the basis of an edge for digital currency over existing state-backed money”. That’s a pretty interesting statement from someone who is a thorough student of money. If he is right, and money becomes more closely connected with the social goals of the communities that it serves, then the future of money will look very different from both the Washington Consensus and Star Trek (that is, there won’t be a “galactic credit” or whatever, but very many different kinds of money).

Now, you may think that all this talk about digital currencies is just unhinged techno-determinism when it comes from me, and you can safely ignore it, but when it comes from Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and pillar of the Washington Consensus, you have to take it seriously. In a talk given to the Bank of England conference on “Central Banking and Fintech” (29th September 2017), she said that virtual currencies [by which she means digital currencies in my taxonomy] could actually become more stable than fiat currencies. She says “for instance, they could be issued one-for-one for dollars, or a stable basket of currencies”. This idea of creating a what is strictly speaking a digital currency board is not new and I was interested to see Ms. Lagarde’s mention of a basket of currencies as a viable option. In my recent book “Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin” I discuss this as one of the potential futures for money, with reference to the vision of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. Many years ago, John Major proposed just such an extremely sensible alternative to the euro, which at the time was labelled the “hard ECU”.

The idea of the hard ECU was to have a pan-European digital currency (it would never exist in physical form) but still be accepted in all member states. I am not alone in thinking that this was a missed opportunity. Keith Hart, author of the brilliant “The Memory Bank“, a book about money from an anthropological perspective, wrote that it was a big mistake to replace national currencies with the euro. He further pointed out that the hard ECU would have meant politically-managed fiat currencies alongside a low-inflation alternative, a plural option enjoyed by countries that didn’t join the euro, like Britain and Switzerland. I couldn’t agree with Keith more.

The hard ECU, or as I used to like calling it, the e-ecu was always a better idea than the Euro but when John Major proposed it, he was ignored. He envisaged a cross-border currency for businesses and tourists to use. Thus, businesses could keep accounts in hard ECUs and trade them cross-border with minimal transaction costs and no foreign exchange risk and tourists could have hard ECU payment cards that they could use across the continent. But each state would continue with its own national currency — you would still be able to use Sterling notes and coins and Sterling-denominated cards — and the cost of replacing them would have been saved.

Real Money.

When researching the hard ECU concept for my book, I discovered that the proposal goes back well before Ms. Lagarde and Mr. Major and back into the early days of Margaret Thatcher’s government, in a 1983 report of the European Parliament on the European Monetary System. The proposal was at that time supported across the political and national groups in the parliament, including by the Germans so long as the central bank only concerned itself with stability of the currency (as subsequently transpired). It was taken up by Mrs. Thatcher’s government as a practical single currency for Europe, a means to expand the UK’s financial services industry across a European single market. But it never made it and the later political drive for the euro sidelined it.

The point is, though, that it was a feasible option and that a digital currency that is backed by a reserve (whether of dollars or some basket of currencies or, indeed, commodities) is a sensible idea. In fact, it’s already being tried in a couple of places. In Kenya, where M-PESA is a private currency backed 1-1 by Kenyan shillings. And in Ecuador, where the government has been trying to launch a Central Bank digital currency. Any Ecuadorian over the age of 18 can open an account for free and transfer money to other people for free.

An interesting aspect of this otherwise fairly straightforward value transfer system is that is denominated in US Dollars. The US Dollar has been legal tender in Ecuador since 2000, when the post-gold standard “Sucre” was abandoned although, apparently, the “centavo” coins are still in use. This is a practical solution to the big problem of small change under “dollarisation” and most countries that use the dollar still mint local coins: thus, Ecuador uses the dollar as legal tender but mints centavo coins. The government guarantees that anyone who wants to exchange 100 Ecuadorean centavos for a genuine United States dollar can do so. As the economist John Kay noted when he reflected on the coins in his pocket in Ecuador, is in itself an interesting comment on the subject of money. He also pointed out that there is a 50 cent coin minted for the government of Ecuador while the US does not issue 50 cent coins. So “while everyone in the Galápagos or the national capital Quito would accept my 50 cent coin, no one in Washington would”. He went on to note the curiosity that “genuine dollar coins, minted for the US Treasury, have not proved popular in the US but are widely circulated in Ecuador”. It is important to understand that the US Federal Reserve banknotes that are in circulation in Ecuador, stuffed under mattresses in Ecuador and fuelling the less-formal sections of the Ecuadorian economy are in essence an interest-free loan to Uncle Sam. By replacing these with digital currency, the Ecuadorian central bank can reclaim the seigniorage for itself.

All well and good and the ability to transact electronically will also be of the great benefit to the citizens and should cut transaction costs across the economy. If the central bank were to ask the advice of people with knowledge of the creation of a national non-bank mobile payment system (e.g., my colleagues at Consult Hyperion) I am sure that they would be advised to make the system a platform for innovation to encourage entrepreneurs to build local solutions on top of it. The lack of APIs in the initial roll-out of M-PESA was, in hindsight, a mistake and Ecuador could clearly learn from this to capture even more benefits from its transition to digital currency.

Unreal Money.

The Ecuadorian Digital Dollar has, I have to say, not been universally well-received. A suggestion for governments thinking of introducing such a system in the future is that it would benefit greatly from transparent auditing as citizens will not hold the electronic currency unless they are sure that it will remain redeemable at par for US dollars (or other basket of currencies or commodities) themselves. Any suspicion of fractional reserve is disastrous. If the government were to fall prey to the temptation to put more of the digital dollars in circulation than they have (or have the equivalent of) in reserve then, as the Wall Street Journal observed at the time of launch, they will simply be creating doomed electronic assignats that will never obtain traction in the wider economy and Ecuador will be unable to reap the many benefits of its transition away from cash. Christine makes this point herself, saying that the issuing of such a digital currency could be “fully transparent, governed by a credible, pre-defined rule, an algorithm that can be monitored…or even a ‘smart rule’ that might reflect changing macroeconomic circumstances”. I agree strongly: the use of shared ledgers and other such technology may be of maximum benefit in delivering the robustness and availability that a national cash replacement system and the radical transparency that it is required to give people faith in the system.

P.S. In case you see any tweets, newspaper comment or learned articles that refer to the Ecuadorean digital experiment in monetary futures as a “cryptocurrency” please bear in mind that it isn’t.